I would think that it'd be pretty uncommon to be accepted at the pre-idea stage though, no? I mean, seed funding for literally nothing more than a good team is pretty tough to come by. For FI that's actually pretty common (at least in my experience).
Not taking it personally, no worries. Just want to make sure the FI doesn't get disrespected. Realize I might not be in the right place for that though :)
I certainly don't understand YC as well as I do FI, but I would think a lot of it comes down to how far along you are with your company. FI might be more valuable if you're less advanced - have a great idea, maybe a prototype but not a ton else. YC is probably more suited for companies that are further along. YC grads can feel free to correct me on that.
Whichever you choose I'd make sure you really, fully, totally, unequivocally understand as much about the details of the program as you can. As others have mentioned here and elsewhere, there are bound to be surprises no matter which program you enter. The goal is to minimize the impact of those surprises.
My first question would be why you consider YC to be your best choice. No offense intended to the host of this forum, but there's a lot of reasons that might not be true. Clearly YC gets better press, but as with FI it's not for everyone. A lot depends on the stage of your idea/company.
My gut reaction to the underlying question is that you should focus on figuring out which program is better for your situation and devote yourself to it. Having been through the FI experience I personally find the idea of using it as a fallback or filler a bit insulting, but Institute doesn't make that distinction.
I hear you. I'm also glad to hear they're tweaking the formula. I think we can agree it's not only fair but important to set the incorporation requirement a little earlier in the session.
From the Institute's perspective, there are some (although not many) who saw the program as an easy means to gain access to mentors and investors for little or no commitment on their part. As such, they have no intention of graduating. Forcing them to decide sooner weeds them out.
From the founder's perspective, those not planning on graduating detract from the overall experience because they're not contributing positively. In some cases they're actually they're making it difficult for others. In NY I found the program started to become more relevant to me as the less-committed and less-advanced founders started dropping out.
With regards to incorporation, I would only say the word "pressure" (at least in NY) might be too strong. They put it out there and make it clear - incorporate or clear out of the way. But in no way do they force you to do something you don't think you're ready for.
As for awolf's statement that it wasn't clear that it was a requirement, it's obviously meaningless to refute that subjectively. I will say that there's an entire section in the Founder's Guide (which you have access to once you're accepted) covering incorporation. The very first line is:
"Forming a company before the end of the semester and issuing the Bonus Pool Warrant is required to graduate."
Granted, that section might have been edited mid-year, but I remember understanding the point clearly before entering, mostly because I had an LLC and knew I'd have to convert it. It might suffer a bit from being right after the "Fundraising" section, which I'll assume most founders fast-forward to and reread over and over :)
I'm in the NY program, which is finishing up next week. I know a couple of others in the NY program lurk here as well. Feel free to hit me up if you have questions about Founder Institute.
That's good to hear. Linux doesn't scare me at all. It's Linux on a laptop that scares me. I'm a command line kind of guy, but not a hardware kind of guy. I just want to spend time being productive, not chasing down info in forums. Last time I had Linux on a laptop (a long time ago) it took literally a PhD to help me get it done.
I agree. I was thinking of spam in a generic sense. He had to have generated a bunch of these and bulk mailed them or else he would have taken the time to customize them.
Doesn't exactly fit your criteria in terms generating revenue, but I wrote a plugin for TiddlyWiki (http://www.tiddlywiki.com/) that allows you to store your address book inside a TiddlyWiki file. It includes import and export, and since TiddlyWiki is JavaScript based you can fully script your address book to your liking. It's called TiddlyWiki Address Book (i.e. twab, http://www.tiddly-twab.com/). It's fairly popular among those who use TiddlyWiki and more importantly is something I'm proud of for a number of reasons.
>> it would encourage people to create accounts on my system for the sole purpose of gaining these badges.
I doubt anyone would make a (non-spam) system that rewards people just for signing up. The site creator would be careful to reward only meaningful actions. So this isn't realistic.
>> It further encourages behavior designed to obtain badges.
That's the whole point of the badge itself though - encourage a particular type of behavior. I don't see this as a problem either.
>> bill it as a more generic hub for sharing information about what users get done in a given application
It's an interesting idea but there are a couple of things you should think through before taking it too much further. I don't think depending on partnerships is necessarily horrible, but what I'm trying to determine is what the benefit for the partner is. In the Stack Overflow example, Stack Overflow has to create the logic of when to award the badge, create the badge asset (e.g. what it looks like), and call your service at the appropriate time. So far they've done all the work for your benefit. What do they get in return? This is the kind of thing you might want to think about otherwise it's just a glorified/unified badge gallery, which won't be terribly interesting to many people.
I also think your example of other services limiting behavior depending on badges gained on other sites to be unlikely. From the consumer's perspective, a reputation system has a lot of value in context, but that's very different than saying that my reputation on one site has value on another. From the partner's perspective, I find it unlikely that I would build a site that depends on my audience's behavior on someone else's site.
I don't think these things are deal breakers, you just have to target it a little more precisely. Nice work so far.
I've been using rsync.net (http://rsync.net/) for years. With your requirement to be able to encrypt, you can use a number of means since they are very flexible. One I've used is to have some/all of my files encrypted with TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/). This won't work for large data sets though, so you can look into something like Duplicity (http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/duplicity.txt). Haven't used it myself so can't comment on it. They also support encrypted file systems. All in all, I think rsync.net is easily one of the best values of any service I use.
Agreed for the most part. It drives me crazy when people make absurd comments like "PHP doesn't scale". Besides the fact that there are plenty of examples of PHP sites that have scaled, it exposes a basic ignorance of modern software development. That being said, I wouldn't want to sit down and try to do all my development in Pascal because it also has AND and OR, but I think we all get the point.
Yes, I think that's fair and appropriate. PHP isn't necessarily sexy to many developers for a number of reasons (not a small part of it is the echo chamber effect), but it can be rewarding, productive, and performant. If nothing else, you'll have something else to put on your resume.
Ooo, this is total flame war bait.....You're making a lot of assumptions about what a "modern" language is here, but I wont' dwell on that : ) Suffice it to say you should give PHP another look, particularly in the context of some of the PHP frameworks that are popular these days (e.g. CodeIgniter, Zend, CakePHP, etc.)
I develop in Java for my full-time job and develop in PHP for my side projects. I enjoy PHP much more than Java. It's a tool, and as with every tool you need to understand how to use it effectively. Some people don't have the mindset that makes this possible, but for those that are willing to let their instincts take over (as opposed to the compiler) can find PHP to be very productive. That being said, I can't for the life of me understand how something as big as Facebook can be done in PHP, but I'm willing to assume those guys are smarter than I am.
I would think that it'd be pretty uncommon to be accepted at the pre-idea stage though, no? I mean, seed funding for literally nothing more than a good team is pretty tough to come by. For FI that's actually pretty common (at least in my experience).